As it happened, despite their blithe assurances, these scientists weren’t entirely confident they could erase most of his adult memories while leaving his attachment to Sung intact. So they mucked around in his mind for a while, engaged in some initial exploratory tinkering, tested a few pet theories, then closed it up and called it a day.
The effect of all this clumsy mucking is that Unruh, despite their assurances, only remembers bits and pieces of John Sung. For example, he remembers that such a man existed. He remembers that this man was dear to him. But what he looked like, his laugh, his touch—all of that is beyond Unruh’s recollecting.
He cannot remember Sung’s face.
His only memory is of the man in the hood, and of the fact that he cared about that man very much.
The looming murderous figure being evoked breathlessly on cable news and during hastily adjourned congressional hearings—the ravenous bogeyman conjured from the rantings of the hysterical press—that man would have been all but unrecognizable to Unruh himself, muddled and murmuring alone in his containment cell.
He never watched his own hearings.
He was simply loaded on a school bus. With seven other similarly befuddled folk.
There was a woman on the bus. To Unruh, she looked pregnant.
There was a man, dressed as a sheriff.
The eight of them were driven for hours over the Texan plains.
Then he was interviewed, briefly, by that weary-looking sheriff in his crumpled brown uniform, who welcomed him, along with all the others, in a garishly lit and chilly trailer, to a new town with a strange name, where the sheriff promised all of them they would not only live, but flourish.
He was given a new name.
William Wayne.
After a vice president and a movie star.
The sheriff stamped a paper, which he then signed and filed away.
“Welcome to Caesura,” he said.
Wayne was assigned a modest cinder block bungalow in a very quiet part of town. There were so few of them living there back then.
On his very first night in his new home, he sat down at the kitchen table with a piece of white paper and a pencil.
He sat and stared at the paper for hours, pencil poised. Struggling to conjure, with great effort, the memory of a hooded figure in chains.
Then he started with the pencil. A few scratches, at first.
Hoping to draw a picture of the face of his friend John Sung.
“John Sung is dead,” this woman says to him now.
John’s daughter.
So he had a daughter.
Wayne shows her his drawing. Unfolds it on the coffee table. Smoothes it flat with a twisted hand.
He’s worked on the drawing for eight years. It is remarkably detailed.
Lifelike, even.
“Tell me one thing,” Wayne asks her. “Did he look like this?”
She studies the sketch. She strains to remember. Then she confesses, “I don’t know. I don’t remember him. That’s why I brought you the photo. I hoped that you would.”
Wayne sets the photo, the one she slipped under the door, the one Wayne hung in the window as a sign to her, as a beacon—the photo of young John Sung, smiling—next to his own drawing.
The likeness is remarkable.
“That’s him,” she says.
“Let me tell you what I do remember about him,” says Wayne.
She starts to cry.
They both cry.
27.
FRAN LINGERS in the bedroom doorway, watching Isaac play, one last time. He’s seated on the carpet of his bedroom with his race car, spinning it in noisy doughnuts, the car racing in circles to nowhere. Lost in his world. A child’s world. That’s all she ever wanted to build for him. Somewhere safe to get lost in.
“Isaac, honey,” she says. “I need you to pack your things.”
She says it as calmly as it is possible for her to say it in the context of this moment. She is mindful above all not to frighten him. “Just a few shirts and some pants. Quick, quick. Pick your favorites. I’ll get a bag for us. Then we have to go.”
“Go where?” he says, the car clutched in his hand.
“We’re going to ask Sheriff Cooper to take us for a drive.”
“In his truck?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Walking briskly home from the library, a few torn-out articles stuffed in her pockets, she’d thought about going to find Cooper herself, but she wanted to be here, at home. So she flagged down Walt Robinson on the main street as he wandered away from the intake trailer, looking somewhat dazed, even for him, and asked Walt to deliver her message. “Find Cooper and tell him we’re ready,” she said. “Tell him we’ll be waiting at my house.”
“Ready for what?” Robinson asked.
“He’ll know,” she said.
Now Isaac scrambles to his feet in his room. “What about my cards?” he says, hiking up the loose waist of his corduroy pants.
“Which cards?”
“From my treasure box.”
She remembers his box, the one that was missing from under the dresser.
“Where did you put it? I checked its usual spot, but it wasn’t there,” she says.
“I took the box outside,” Isaac says. “I buried it. I dug a hole in the yard.”
“Why did you do that?” she says.
“I didn’t want to lose the cards.”
“But why would you lose them?”
“I didn’t want the man to take them away.”
Fran’s stomach curdles.
“What man?” she asks, as gingerly as she can manage.
“The man who came to town. The man who gave the cards to me.”
“Who did?”
“The man in the suit. At the movie theater.”
She crouches on her haunches, grabs his shoulders, pulls him closer. Don’t panic him, she thinks. Don’t panic him, even as she herself is on the edge of losing it. He’s already flinching, like he’s worried he’ll get in trouble, like she’s about to lash out, and there must be a reason he hasn’t told her any of this before.
“Tell me about that man.”
“He gave me the cards. For free. As a present. After the movie.”
“No, honey,” she says. “You got those cards from the store. Remember? Spiro ordered them for you.”
“Those were different ones. New ones,” says Isaac. “The man gave me the first pack. I put it in my box.”
“You didn’t show me?”
“I put it in my box and put it under my dresser,” says Isaac, his brown eyes brimming. He’s in trouble, he knows it, he doesn’t want to be in trouble.
Fran collects herself, or tries. “Where was Sheriff Cooper? When this man gave you the cards?”
“Someone was asking him something. A woman. He was distracted. The man gave me the cards and walked away.”
“What did this man look like?”
“Like he was going to a funeral.”
“Like he was sad?”
“No, like he was dressed up in a black suit. He didn’t look sad.”
“And he gave you those trading cards?”
“Yes. He cut my hair.”
Fran squeezes his shoulders more tightly; she can’t help it. “He did what?”
“He cut my hair. He said it was his job. Sheriff Cooper was distracted. It was crowded in the lobby.”
“But, Isaac, your hair’s not cut. Mommy would have noticed.”
“He cut a little piece of my hair.” Isaac grabs a clump of his brown curls in the back. “Right here.”
Fran looks at it, fingering through the hair—there, she would barely have noticed, she didn’t notice, his hair’s so shaggy now, but there it is, a little chunk of his hair is gone, just a tiny snip.
“Did you tell Sheriff Cooper?”
“The man told me it was a secret.”
“Did you tell anyone?”